Penmarric Read Online Free PDF

depends on this interview with Giles …” She stopped. “Mark, you’re not listening to me.”
    I roused myself with an effort. “I’m sorry.”
    “You see, I described you to Giles. I said that you looked and thought and behaved like a Penmar …”
    This infuriated me. I had spent too much time trying to be like my father to welcome any statement from her that I bore no resemblance to him. Before I could stop myself I said in my sharpest tone of voice, “I’m just as much a Castallack as I am a Penmar!”
    “Really?” said my mother. “I wish I could be as certain of that as you are.”
    For a moment nothing happened.
    I went on looking at her. She was wearing a voluminous purple gown that was fastened at the throat with a diamond clasp, and presently that clasp was all I could see. I can remember it still. I can close my eyes and see all those diamonds, shoulder to shoulder, a row of jagged predatory teeth that glittered brilliantly in the hard midday light.
    “Well, I never meant to tell you because I wasn’t entirely certain, but you see, I told Giles …” She was talking again, talking rapidly, not looking at me, and her voice seemed alien and remote, the voice of a stranger who spoke of things I did not want to understand.
    “… unhappy when I was young. I had no wish to marry, all I wanted was to keep house for my father, to stay at Penmarric … My father was horrified, he said unless I married within the year he would cut me out of his will … so I married the next man who asked me. Well, I mean, how could your father and I be happy under those circumstances? How could we? I didn’t love him, refused to behave as a wife should … he asked me to leave in the end. My father had to take me back then because there was nowhere else I could go. It was summer. Giles was there. The rhododendrons were in bloom, you should have seen the rhododendrons, they were so beautiful, it was such a beautiful summer … I wanted to annul my marriage to Laurence and marry Giles, but my father wouldn’t have it; He approved of Laurence. The Penmars were still considered upstarts, you see, still nouveaux riches, and the Castallacks of Gweek were such an old and well-respected family … And my father did not approve of marriages between cousins and he had other plans for Giles, an heiress from Launceton. I would have defied my father even then, but. Giles … Defiance didn’t come easily to Giles. After it was all over I went back to Laurence at Gweek. I wanted to show Giles that I too could turn my back on someone I loved and live with someone else … God knows why Laurence took me back. I suppose he felt it was his duty. For five years we lived as husband and wife, five pregnancies, you, Nigel, two miscarriages and—but you wouldn’t remember the baby who died soon after he was born. And then at last my father died and I had the means to escape to London … I never saw Giles again after my father’s funeral, you know. Sixteen years … He never once came to London to see the way his case was being conducted in the law courts. Everything was done through his lawyers. Apart from the occasion of my father’s funeral—when he all but ignored me—I haven’t seen Giles since I left Penmarric just before the Christmas of 1868 … Nine months before you were born.”
    She stopped. There was a long pause before she said in a more normal voice, “So when I heard Raymond was dead and I knew I must write to Giles, I suddenly realized that if Giles knew—if he thought … I never told anyone, you see, because I wasn’t certain. But since you show no resemblance at all to Laurence Castallack …”
    I stood up.
    “But surely you can understand, Mark! If Giles thinks you’re his son he won’t even consider making Harry his heir! Mark, I acted in your best interests! If one day you can inherit Penmarric—”
    “Damn Penmarric.”
    “Mark!”
    “And damn you,” I said carefully and began to run. I ran through the